Results of March 2026 Poetry Competition

The judge of our quarterly poetry competition is Dorothy Pope, the Society’s Poet in Residence, who also sets the theme for each competition.

Judge’s Report on the March 2026 Poetry Competition themed ‘Music’

Poems on the theme of ‘Music’ featured dawn, orchestras, composing, church music, and church music after bombing, all in either free verse or as sonnets. Both first and second prize winners wrote about dawn though with different attitudes to the coming of the new day.

The winner is Gwyneth Box with her wonderful free verse poem ‘4 am: overture’. We hear with her the fidgeting, squeaking, crooning: tiny sounds of birds and animals as they stir. I particularly admired ‘a cockerel coughs his cliched script’. The verbs are a delight. ‘In the wings’ is clever, the title perfect. The poem’s ending of ‘A new day eases slowly into action’ serves to imagine the poet slowly easing herself out of sleep.

The runner-up is John Keane with his sonnet ‘Strange Notes’. This too is about the arrival of a new day but the poet sees it as unwelcome, an invader of sleep and dreaming, as ‘time lifts its iron head’ and the day’s demands. The final line is reminiscent of Keats’s conclusion to ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘Fled is that music’.

Both poems were a joy to encounter.

Please note that because of the sheer volume of work, I am unable to provide feedback other than on the two winners.

Dorothy Pope

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The Winner

4 am: overture

Small birds fidget in the dark.
They squeak and whirr, then
birdsong swells and weaves
around the house in waves
of sibilance to spin a spell
that teases out the softening grey.
In the wings, a cockerel
coughs his clichéd script;
the neighbour’s cat croons
throatily and a distant dog
worries his concerns. The stage
is set. A new day eases slowly
into action.

Gwyneth Box

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The Runner-Up

Strange Notes

And music rolled like breakers to the shore
untarnished as a flake of minted snow:
more lucent than a darting spring in flow,
a flight of shining notes beyond all flaw.
Ere ray of morning light proclaimed the day
that fugue invoked a world of ecstasy,
supernal in its boundless mystery:
a place where time and trouble held no sway.

A motor turns, invading walls of calm
with urgent coughs. Time lifts its iron head.
The notes fall strange, and lose their elfin charm.
A sleepless chip brings pixels to a screen:
a message pings, demanding to be read.
And gone for good the music of a dream.

John Keane

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The next poetry competition will be announced here on 1 June 2026